#I Live Where You Vacation

[bixels]

In the past, people in the Animal Crossing community would make fun of Tom Nook as a sleazy landlord. Since then, he's really rehabilitated his image as this 'heart of gold' businessman (he's the one who puts bells and furniture in trees for you to find! he adopted orphans! he donates to charity!), but New Horizons genuinely paints the most devious version of him.

He's successfully privatized settler colonialism: you pay HIM to move to a "deserted island" (which apparently the oceans in the AC world are just full of) and start a colony that he is directly invested in. At best he's running a weird vacation package scam (you arrive on the island with no money and in debt for "using his services"). At worst, he's using you to set up company towns. For god's sake, he literally has his own fake currency that he forces you to use to pay off your debt. But don't worry, he's repackaged it in a way that definitely doesn't sound like an MLM scam: the Nook Mileage Program!

You're no longer just his tenant or his temporary part-timer, you're his business lackey. The entire tutorial section of the game has you spending actual weeks running around completing tasks and doing hard labor to set up his colony. You're even tasked with preparing his properties and finding buyers for them. No, you aren't a tenant anymore. You work for the landlord. You are directly responsible for finding tenants for him. And he doesn't even fucking pay you. Not for setting up town hall and museum, or his nephew's shop –– which is the ONLY store on the entire island that sells necessities –– or bringing KK Slider to town, or helping populate his town. Not a single cent. No, actually, you have to pay HIM to BUY infrastructure like bridges and stairs and park benches. And all the while, he's telling you're the "resident representative"; you get to call the shots! That the reward is the community's progress. That what you're doing is in everyone's best interest (but most importantly, his).

Since NH's release, people have done a lot of legwork to say that Tom Nook isn't a capitalist while the game shows him at his very worst. He owns the only general store in town. You're forced to use a phone that he modified and branded as his own. Buy Nook-branded furniture and merchandise at the self-serve kiosk in the town hall, a governmental building! There's no conflict of interest here!

But hey, if you're tired of being the landlord/business mogul's goon, you can also find work as a deluxe resort home designer for a company that also pays you in their special company currency that can only be used to buy their products instead of a real salary! Because that's what the Animal Crossing franchise needs! More vacation homes!!!

[bbyglock]

ground yourself. 🤍

[unlikecharlie]

every comment or post that I see yelling about sympathy, empathy, and reminding us that those people are humans with lives and families only makes me wish they're dead even harder. matter of fact, I hope they all suffer as much as possible and then go to hell and suffer even more. there

[vyeoh]

Having been through the exact airport they likely flew in through makes Jimmy's customs story infinitely funnier

[murderballadeer]

crazy how when my parents moved to this neighbourhood it was like a quirky relatively inexpensive area with mostly artists and immigrants and then it got gentrified to hell and back and then tourism took off and now i have to contend with being treated like set dressing by tour guides who think it's ok to invade my privacy for profit by letting random strangers stare at my bedroom window

[rosie-b]

🦮 fill this empty space (ask game)

(link to the summary)

This turned out to be... longer than a snippet, and like the summary, angstier than I expected. It's been that kind of week ig! But there's a promising ending because I needed one :)

It had been a warm summer day when the old Marinette died.

The new Marinette woke up surrounded by golden light, soft, green grass, and the soft murmurings of a stream in northern France. It was perhaps the best way for her rebirth to happen, in a calm, relaxing environment far from the place she somehow knew was home.

She met her family there. They already knew her, and called her "maman," or "ma femme," or "my lady."

Marinette was no one's lady. She never had been, but according to video evidence and the testimony of her husband and children and best friend, that was one of the many roles her past self had filled.

Marinette did not know how to fill any of those old roles anymore. But because of the secret, magical way she'd chosen to lose her memories, she couldn't let anyone know this fact. She had to study years worth of business lessons in mere weeks, preparing for her return to Paris and the international company she would soon be in charge of running again.

At least her past self had accounted for this new Marinette's incompetence. But no one else seemed to see that she wasn't the same woman she had been once, back when a kwami lived in her purse and villains of the day (and year) kept plaguing Paris.

Adrien, the man past-Marinette had married, professed to still be in love with her. He saw some of the differences between the new Marinette and the old one, but claimed they weren't nearly as big as Marinette thought they were. And he chose to spend most of his time around her, so maybe he was right. He whispered praises for each small thing she did, both when they were alone and in public; took the time to learn her new habits; made her fresh coffee for when she woke up two hours after he did; stayed out of her bed to help her feel comfortable.

Marinette could see why her past self had loved him. It was something both halves of her were beginning to share, a love for this man who found a way to bring joy to her life even when it had been turned upside down.

But it didn't change the fact that the new Marinette was not the same woman he'd married. That fact was written into the vows Adrien and the past Marinette had exchanged; the way they had split up their chores; the daily schedule that Adrien still remembered while the new Marinette did not.

To Marinette, this new self of hers was nothing more than a facade made to cover the void her past self had left behind. She was thirty years old and as empty inside as a newborn baby, with no memories to guide her through this unfamiliar world.

Marinette was an icon, the magazines said. A paragon of virtue in an age of corruption, one half of both Paris' favorite couples, a woman who managed to be a world-famous CEO and an attentive mother at the same time.

That wasn't the new Marinette's reality. She didn't even know her children's middle names, though she was learning their favorite desserts, sports, and hobbies.

Most days, it was like learning a foreign language, and it felt just as isolating when she got something wrong or tried to remember something she thought she knew but actually didn't. Sometimes, this new life of hers was crushing, a drain on her already empty self, taking the last bit of Marinette out of her.

But not always.

As out of place as Marinette felt in her own life, the people in it still felt right somehow. They'd been there for her when she woke up; they were there to hug and comfort her when she cried in the night, to help teach her about her own life and tell her about theirs, and to listen when she said she felt different. They loved her, that much was clear, and they promised to love her no matter which Marinette she was; the old one with all her memories or the new one just fumbling through life.

And somehow, even though she claimed not to feel anything more for them than for other strangers at first, Marinette still loved them back. Their presence soothed the ache she felt in her chest, the one she felt when she couldn't remember, and she found herself more than missing them when they weren't there. She looked forward to hearing about their day, to learning their middle names; she held on to the facts they told her about themselves like sweet gifts of gold and honey, like they were all she needed to survive, to fill the empty space her memories had left behind.

The new Marinette was not the old one, and she never would be.

But maybe that was okay. The new Marinette had her own space, too; it began here, in this remote, rural town near the seashore, and it would expand back to Paris, to the place where the old Marinette had lived.

Marinette's home had always been her family, the people she loved. That was something she knew without having to remember it, and something she was more sure of every day.

So she studied the journals her past self had written, re-learned how to design, baked bread beside Adrien, sang songs with her children and stayed by their side. If her mind was an empty slate, then she was going to fill it with love, the same love she'd chosen before and was choosing again.

And someday, this new Marinette would feel whole again.

Thanks for the ask! I hope you enjoyed <3

[semiotomatics]

lol. i think ive reached my limit.

[sydmarch]

no interest in any of my hobbies next to no concerts going on all summer feeling abandoned by the majority of the few irls I still have no idea where to meet new people to replace them now that I'm not part of the highly social hard partying sales culture I spent basically all of my post college life in anymore literally what reason is there to keep trying

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

can i say. i kinda hate that in the sims 4, in order to eat selvadoradian food you have to have a good selvadoradian skill. I will literally have my teens, who are born to and being raised by a parent of selvadoradian roots. and if they eat the food that parent makes they get moodlet like

And literally cannot continue eating the dish until this moodlet is gone? Plus with a sim that going through a picky eater phase I've gotten

Wild to me that my sims will eat like, buñuelos, arepas, feijoada, empanadas, platanos fritos, etc and be so overwhelmed and uncomfortable they literally can't eat. not to mention that there is no good way to gain the selvadoradian culture skill outside of vacationing to selvadorada. So essentially you can have a child that is born to someone from selvadorada and that child will literally not be able to eat the food the parent makes or learn the culture skill from that parent in any meaningful way outside of slight bumps from being told a legend or shown photos of a vacation.

[taldigi]

were there any pre canon concepts for adrien's/felix's room? i hate the canon one so much the layout confuses me

Afraid not. I think the closest we have is the information that Felix/ Adrian's family owned a hotel (this is before he was made into the villain's son.) A lot of early and even current ladybug is pretty focused around Marinette. Nathan-Felix-Adrien as a character is shockingly inconsequential to the narrative as a whole. (Which is probably why he was so easily edited throughout development whereas Marinette stayed pretty consistent.... And is also apparently still the case from what I've heard of the recent season.)

You can actually really see a lot of the inspiration that it transferred to the agreste mansion... But it also lost a lot of style and flair. Richard had a lot of art deco inspiration in the buildings associated with his character. And you can kind of see that in the hotel piece here. It's all connected, at least I believe it is.

It makes sense that the current one is frustrating. It's a mix between " oh this is what a fabulously wealthy teen boy would like" being full of video games and literal arcade machines, but still having like no personality? Like it's big. Because Adrian is rich. And it's like... Largely undecorated because Gabriel is like a minimalist or whatever... Except for all of the stuff that Adrian has because he's rich. And that's literally the end of it.

Edit: If I were to fathom a... A room that does line up with that hotel era then I would do something like this, except with more whites and golds rather than blue... Or just tailor it to however the cat's relationship to his father is.

[isfjmel-phleg]

🤐

[miralparis]

lmaooooooo

[scionshtola]

what if i brought cori’s mom to tural 🥺

[autumnalhalcyon]

.

[eccentriccryptid]

.

[mangostarjam]

where's that post about wanting a quiet life —

i turned down an interview to promote to a supervisory position and my boss has been gently disappointed (and wrangled another boss to join in this) and i just — i appreciate their confidence in me and my abilities but i also just... don't... want that job. i get paid enough now and can make it work (and it's unionized so i still have raises in my future) —

i don't want to toss aside my hard fought work life balance and take on all that responsibility. i just want to do my job, not care so much about it, and use my free time for what i actually enjoy in life